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Deathbot 1.0 Reference

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Deathbot 1.0 Reference

Notes

Episode published on Friday 11th of January, 2008.

When you enter an online character tournament, you've got to win your place. This means that you provide a reference sheet for your character/s (and/or vehicle, depending on the tournament) and an audition page showing how and why your characters have entered the tournament.

Steel Nation is a mech tournament. This wholly disinterested me at first, I wasn't going to enter at all. Suddenly, the weekend before the audition deadline, I realised that I had two characters who would fit very nicely into the tournament, and so I hammered out the ref sheets you see here and the audition page with about half a day to spare.

Frankly, had it not been for the lack of other competitors entering (Dire had been looking for 32 competitors, and they didn't exactly flood in from what I remember) I suspect that I would not have made it into the final selection. I'm glad I did!

The Deathbot is a homage to all the mecha that you'd fight as boss characters at the end of levels in 16-bit platforming games. Given that I figured the Docs, being the careless people they are, would have spent about five minutes on designing the mech, that's what I did - I spent literally five minutes on this design. I wanted to enter a shabby, worthless mech to make the rounds far more taxing and so that I would have to creatively dispatch my opponents. Giving your characters the disadvantage is now something I always do in OC tournaments, as it makes you think a lot harder about the story.

P.S. My PC is actually called the "Ultimate Electronic Abominator"!

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Transcript

TITLE: Deathbot 1.0 a.k.a. the Ultimate Electronic Abominator

IMAGE: The main image is an annotated image of the doctors' ramshackle mech, the "Deathbot".

MECH FEATURES:

  • Retractable snake-like neck
  • The head is mainly aesthetic (it looks skull-like) but the eyes contain cameras and there is a speaker system in the mouth connected to the cockpit's intercomm
  • Drill arms
  • A third retractable arm, fitted with universal joints. This third arm has "your standard low-grade pincer for grabbing stuff"
  • It moves along on two Archimedes' screws, essentially proof that agricultural principles can be applied to warfare. Each screw has a jet engine on the back
  • Mounted on the screws, the main body is on a turntable which can rotate 360 degrees
  • A "bolter" cannon which fires oversized red-hot rivets or "bolts", hence the name. Ammo clip contains 20 of the huge rounds
  • The cockpit sits inside the body. The cockpit sits behind 15 inches of reinforced bulletproof perspex and the cockpit window itself is fitted with emergency blast furnace-grade doors which can slide across the window

IMAGE 2: There is a logo, a sinister smiling face overlaid with a wireframe skull symbol.

DESCRIPTION: This is the insignia of the two doctors and it is on the back of the Deathbot.

IMAGE 3: There is an annotated image of the cockpit.

COCKPIT FEATURES:

  • Cockpit window
  • A comfy chair
  • A second, even comfier chair
  • One of these chairs is also an ejector seat.
  • Monitor screens which link to diagnostics, cameras in the head, etc.
  • Intercomm in the style of a  CB radio
  • Coffee table, complete with kettle
  • Cockpit controls; you have to stand at the cockpit window in order to operate them. The two doctors are very big on levers and buttons
  • A big red emergency button on the wall, for the shutters on the cockpit window

FURTHER NOTES:

Despite what the Deathbot's creators claim, the Deathbot itself is horribly rickety and vulnerable contraption. You can probably already see several dozen flaws in its design, and rightly so. Dr. Smiffington and Dr. Gyrode are as far from learned scientists as you could possibly imagine. They are not unskilled, but they lack the finesse of modern-day mecha mechanics. They are also very underhanded and have all intentions of stretching the rules to the limit to win.

So do keep in mind that, just because a particular robotic limb looks very flimsy, what's to say that it isn't trying to lure you into a false sense of security and that the two doctors actually want you to rip it off?

It could finally be claimed that, although Deathbot 1.0 is built out of several stolen technologies and has been clumsily welded together, it simplistic constuction also means that most of the complex mechanics inside can be fixed quite easily, probably using a paperclip and an elastic band.